Positive perception: A three dimensional model and a scale

Traits and perceptions that predict psychological and physical well-being have been the focus of great interest in Positive Psychology. The paper focused on positive perception (PP) as a case in point. A three dimensional model of PP is proposed. PP represents a general tendency to evaluate positively one’s abilities, one’s past, and human nature. The construction of an 8-item self-report measure of PP, the Positive Perception Scale (PPS), is detailed. Three samples of university students and a national sample of working couples (total N = 796) helped demonstrate various psychometric aspects of the PPS. The studies confirmed the three dimensional model of PP, demonstrated it as both a trait and a state and the PPS as a valid and reliable scale, for both researchers and practitioners.     

Cyber Bullying Among Teenagers in Israel: An Examination of Cyber Bullying,Traditional Bullying,and Socioemotional Functioning

In this study, the relationships between cyber bullying and involvement in traditional bullying, with reference to social support and gender differences, was examined. Social support plays an important role in empowering victims of cyber bullying and has a significant influence on children and teenagers’ well-being. A sample made up of 458 Israeli junior high students (242 female, 216 male) in the age range of 11 to 13 completed 4 questionnaires. Results indicated that there is an overlap between involvement in cyber bullying and involvement in traditional bullying. The findings indicate that girls were more likely to be cyber victims than boys and that boys were more likely to be cyber bullies than girls. Examination of the relationships between gender and social support variables such as friends, family, and others, shows that girls who were cyber victims reported having more support in all 3 types than cyber bullied boys. These findings can serve as a basis for prevention and intervention programs to cope with cyber bullying.     

TIES that BIND: an introduction to domain mapping as a visualization tool for virtual rehabilitation.

The application of virtual reality (VR) to rehabilitation is a young, interdisciplinary field where clinical implementation very rapidly follows scientific discovery and technological advancement. Implementation is often so rapid that demonstration of intervention efficacy by investigators, and establishment of research and development priorities by funding bodies tend to be more reactive than proactive. An examination of the dynamic unfolding of the history of our young discipline may help us recognize the facilitators of current practice and identify the barriers that limit greater progress. This paper presents a first step towards the examination of the past and future growth of VR-based rehabilitation by presenting the use of concept maps to explore the publication history of application of VR to rehabilitation.     

Not just semantics: Strong frequency and weak cognate effects on semantic association in bilinguals

To investigate the possibility that knowledge of two languages influences the nature of semantic representations, bilinguals and monolinguals were compared in a word association task. In Experiment 1, bilinguals produced less typical responses relative to monolinguals when given cues with a very common associate (e.g., given bride, bilinguals said “dress” instead of “groom”). In Experiment 2, bilinguals produced responses as typical as those of monolinguals when given cues with high-frequency associates, but not when given cues with lowfrequency associates. Bilinguals’ responses were also affected, to a certain extent, by the cognate status of the stimulus word pairs: They were more similar to monolinguals’ responses when the cue and its strongest associate were both cognates (e.g., minute-second is minuto-segundo in Spanish), as opposed to both being noncognates. Experiment 3 confirmed the presence of a robust frequency effect on bilingual but not on monolingual association responses. These findings imply a lexical locus for the bilingual effect on association responses and reveal the association task to be not quite as purely semantic as was previously assumed.